As London riots, beach volleyball's maidens set and spike in sight of No10

There was something grand about the jollity as suntanned Amazonians blocked and bunted in
Horse Guards Parade

Elizabeth Maloney of Canada makes a block in her match with partner Heather Barnsley against the Malaysian pair of Beh Shun Thing and Luk Teck Hua. The Canadians won. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian

Parts of the capital may be smouldering but on Horse Guards parade the Olympic show still goes on. Sport and politics don't mix, its global governing bodies often inform us: but sometimes they simply have no choice.

It might just be bad luck that the test event for the London 2012 women's beach volleyball competition should be scheduled to take place the morning after the capital's most widespread civil disobedience in living memory. It might also be no more than an unfortunate twist that the beach volleyball arena, with its 2,274 tons of Redhill 28 sand and 24 elite international teams, should be situated within 100 yards of New Scotland Yard and the returning prime minister's own front door.

While he was in office Tony Blair joked that he would be able to look out of his window and admire the impossibly toned and suntanned Amazonians of the set and spike hurling themselves about in the shadow of Whitehall. In fact it was the Cobra committee for national security which had that privilege on Tuesday morning, its emergency meeting, chaired by David Cameron, taking place within earshot of the booming Euro house of this FIVB International meeting.

And so it is that women's beach volleyball – the most waggishly derided of Olympic sports, with its po-faced skimpy swimsuit regulations and its enduring air of Baywatch kitsch – has taken on a peculiar significance this Tuesday. Not just in terms of the obvious bathos of a Lycra-clad beach party taking place in the administrative heart of a bedraggled city – but because the Olympics is unavoidably a political beast, a mass turning of the national face towards the world.

Albeit this did all seem a little far away as, in the shadow of the Treasury building, the USA took on China. For the occasion a boarded plastic mini-arena has been erected in one of London's most picturesque spots, at its centre a large sponsored sandbox surrounded by banks of flip-up seats. The test event arena holds about a quarter of next year's projected 10,000 spectators (which is 5,000 less than Wimbledon's Centre Court) and today it was only half-full, with many people giving away their tickets as they left – rather giving the lie to talk of these events all being sold out.

First things first: beach volleyball is a spectacular, easy-access Olympic sport. No prior technical knowledge is required to enjoy the sight of dazzlingly athletic beach maidens smashing and blocking and bunting with great touch and skill. There were some issues: the hugely annoying, migraine-level PA system with its endless sponsor babble and jeering attempts to engender a beach-party ambience; plus the ludicrous and demeaning spectacle of the inter-match dancers, a bikini-clad troupe of comely Portuguese, who performed a butt-waggling R'n'B routine that seemed rather at odds with beach volleyball's claims of being a proper sport with, you know, gravity and that.

But really it was still a rather sombre affair under gloomy London skies, the forced gravity of the occasion unavoidably jarring in context of events both a few miles and few hundred yards away. The IOC is in town overseeing the current raft of test events. This was intended as an exercise in running the rule over issues like accreditation and basic broadcast infrastructure. Instead it suddenly looks, unavoidably, like a test of other things like security capacity and – six years after the successful bid announcement – London's basic fitness to run this kind of global sporting juggernaut event.

The BOC says that "the primary responsibility for security rests with law enforcement authorities, who work closely with the Games Organising Committee and other bodies to ensure every measure is taken to provide a safe and secure environment".

But on Horse Guards Parade beach volleyball was issuing its own statement. In a way there was something rather grand about all this pre-determined jollity in the face of strife elsewhere, the furious professionalism of the dancers, the fevered energy of the sand-rakers and ranks of bibbed stewards, these defiantly bikini-panted elite athletes un-goosebumped by the London chill. They may be rioting in all around London, the Cobra committee may be sweatily thrashing out a battle plan in its basement across the way, but beach volleyball is still smiling through expertly gritted teeth.